Section B

• James Curran and Jean Seaton - Power and Media Industries

  ● the idea that the media is controlled by a small number of companies

  primarily driven by the logic of profit and power

  ● the idea that media concentration generally limits or inhibits variety,

  creativity and quality

  ● the idea that more socially diverse patterns of ownership help to create the

  conditions for more varied and adventurous media productions.
• Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt - Regulation

  ● the idea that there is an underlying struggle in recent UK regulation policy

  between the need to further the interests of citizens (by offering protection

  from harmful or offensive material), and the need to further the interests of

  consumers (by ensuring choice, value for money, and market competition)

  ● the idea that the increasing power of global media corporations, together

  with the rise of convergent media technologies and transformations in the

  production, distribution and marketing of digital media, have placed

  traditional approaches to media regulation at risk
• David Hesmondhalgh - Cultural Industries

  ● the idea that cultural industry companies try to minimise risk and maximise

  audiences through vertical and horizontal integration, and by formatting

  their cultural products (e.g. through the use of stars, genres, and serials)

  ● the idea that the largest companies or conglomerates now operate across

  a number of different cultural industries

  ● the idea that the radical potential of the internet has been contained to

  some extent by its partial incorporation into a large, profit-orientated set of

  cultural industries
• Albert Bandura - Media Effects


  ● the idea that the media can implant ideas in the mind of the audience

  directly

  ● the idea that audiences acquire attitudes, emotional responses and new

  styles of conduct through modelling

  ● the idea that media representations of transgressive behaviour, such as

  violence or physical aggression, can lead audience members to imitate

  those forms of behaviour.
• George Gerbner - Cultivation Theory

  ● the idea that exposure to repeated patterns of representation over long

  periods of time can shape and influence the way in which people perceive

  the world around them (i.e. cultivating particular views and opinions)

  ● the idea that cultivation reinforces mainstream values (dominant

  ideologies).
• Stuart Hall - Reception Theory

  ● the idea that communication is a process involving encoding by producers

  and decoding by audiences

  ● the idea that there are three hypothetical positions from which messages

  and meanings may be decoded:
• Henry Jenkins - Fandom


  ● the idea that fans are active participants in the construction and circulation

  of textual meanings

  ● the idea that fans appropriate texts and read them in ways that are not

  fully authorised by the media producers ('textual poaching')

  ● the idea that fans construct their social and cultural identities through

  borrowing and inflecting mass culture images, and are part of a

  participatory culture that has a vital social dimension.